Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
September 8th 2006 03:43
Eaters of the Dead by Micheal Crichton
The other day I was mumbling against Christopher Benfrey’s review of Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow in which he declaimed against the blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction which according to him shows decline in imagination and serious fiction, whatever that is. I contended that this was nothing new and had been going on for a long time. Curiously enough, I was lead to just such a book and an author who has been blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction all through his career.
I never liked Michael Crichton as an author because he seemed incapable of writing good fiction. He always seemed to force down chunks of information down our throats and he could never turn his interesting concepts into interesting plots. Crichton, not Matthew Pearl, fits Benfrey’s assessment completely. I should have thought of Crichton sooner but I went back to him by the machinations of some divine karma.
I have been reading Beowulf this week and enjoyed it immensely. Researching about the background and historicity of the epic, I was lead to 10th century Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan independently. And because I am interested in ancient travelers, I read about Ibn Fadlan only to find that Crichton used him in his long-forgotten novel Eaters of the Dead which appeared way back in 1976.
Antonio Banderas in 13th warrior, a screen adaptation of Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
Crichton says that he wrote the book on a dare. A friend of his had said that western epics, you know Iliad, Odyssey and that kind of stuff were not interesting any more and Beowulf was the dullest of them all. Crichton told his friend that it would be interesting if written, well, interestingly and set about writing this novel. Some conceit! I read Beowulf recently and found it gobsmackingly interesting. It is Crichton’s book that is dull. I found it interesting only because I thought it would shed light on Beowulf.
But, that proved to be a wrong idea. Ibn Fadlan travelled from Baghdad to the ancient Bulgaria ( modern Kazan on the Volga) and wrote about a tribe he called the Rus. This eventually became the name of Russians and Ibn Fadlan’s account is the first to mention Vikings. It is all tenth-century stuff though. Beowulf was written at least two centuries before that and the events in it might have happened around 6th century. But in Crichton’s book, Ibn Fadlan’s journey does not stop at Volga. On the banks of Volga, he meets the tribe of white haired Northmen, among them a wannabe leader called Buliwyf who is soon called to fight a disaster somewhere north. He takes a band of thirteen warriors along with him with Ibn Fadlan among them and the novel moves further than Fadlan had ever travelled, becoming more and more like a Rider Haggard novel in the process.
As I have said, it is Beowulf that makes this novel interesting not vice versa. Wonder what that will do to Mr.Crichton’s conceit.
| 67 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Anonymous